I didn't set out to buy a computer

My old computer worked great, until it didn't. It needed a battery. Desperately. The problem was, it still worked well while plugged in, at least for now. But it was a MacBook Air, not something I could buy a battery for online and change it out myself.

My first iBook, from 2003 or 2004, still works. It can't handle a modern internet, but if I want to edit graphics on Claris, I can. Every other Mac I've had has simply gone black one day, after around 7 years. So while I was looking for a place to change out the battery in my 8 year old MacBook Air, I began having second thoughts. And ordered a new one.

In the past, changing a computer was a time for cleaning. I moved what I wanted to keep to flash drives, and left everything else. Started clean. And that was my intention with this one. Only it arrived with no way to insert a USB-A flash drive. So I migrated everything from the old one to the new on the WiFi.

Everything.

So now I am cleaning up the new one. And doing so, I found a blog piece I never published. It's from the time period when I had just left my job, and was blogging my journey to a non-work identity. Since I need to get rid of it somehow, here's a blog about not buying food.

I have to buy groceries now too. For the last 11 years, I’ve been bringing home leftover ingredients. Catering generates a huge amount of waste, must more than restaurants, where menu items stay the same for a season. Salmon, halibut, all in weird shapes. Fish doesn’t grow in perfect steaks, and the extra weird pieces are a nice perk. Leftover roasted shrimp. Ugly biscuits. Mashed potatoes. Strawberries that aren’t perfect, Grapes that aren’t on a menu again until next week. The ends of the balls of fresh mozzarella, where we only want flat slices. When high dollar catering sends out perfect food, that perfection generates a lot of good waste that we take home. And I miss that.

Baking is natural to me. Cooking, not so much. It was easy to base any dinner I cooked on what I scored that day.

But I don’t miss having to listen to music all day every day. On my own, I listen now and then. When I work in my studio. Driving. I had learned to block it out, and in doing that, I was blocking everything. Ignoring people talking to me, building a wall of quiet